Tue May 13 2008 10:09Game Non-Design:
Sumana pointed out the other day that scifi.com has the same lame web TV show tie-ins as any other basic cable channel, featuring games that are rebranded versions of games you've played elsewhere. For instance, there's Frakjack, which you may know as blackjack. Seriously, it's exactly the same. The game blurb says: "It's a friendly game of 21... until Starbuck hits the hooch", but although I heroically played several good-faith rounds for review purposes, Starbuck never hit the hooch, or me, or anything for that matter. Nobody even told me that I had no choice or ordered me to do my job.

Big deal, they subcontracted with some company that's got a bunch of prewritten Flash games and skins them for whatever the client is plugging. I don't really understand the point of these games but it's doubly stupid here, because there already is a card game in the Battlestar Galactica universe, and it's not frakjack. It's Triad. Unlike blackjack, Triad is "a friendly game" instead of a game of one person against a dealer. It's played with cool hexagonal cards instead of standard rectangular cards with the players' own faces on them. And it makes a nonzero amount of sense to do it as a tie-in game on the scifi.com website.

I'm well aware of the reasons why this didn't happen, but all those reasons just throw into stark relief the stupidity of what did happen, and what happens whenever you do a tie-in game without doing any game design.

(6) Tue May 13 2008 21:12Lost Update Nanny State:
In the web service I'm working on, we're considering rejecting PUT and PATCH requests unless they're accompanied by a valid If-Unmodified-Since or If-None-Match. Basically forcing clients to consider the lost update problem and work with us to avoid it. If you're trying to PUT a new resource, you need to send If-None-Match: * to avoid stepping on someone else who just created that resource.

Is this legal? Seems okay to me, but I'm not sure what response code to send. 412 ("Precondition Failed") is the obvious choice, but the precondition that failed is that the client didn't specify a precondition, and that's weird. I see that the Astoria team is thinking about the same things (search for "validation during side-effecting operations").

(1) Tue May 13 2008 23:04Request Weblog #3: Game Non-Non-Design:
Ben the request-meister asked for "A specification of a game that you would love to play but hate to make" or vice versa. Here's a sketch for a game I'd love to play: a fractally-scaling societal sandbox that combines the best of Civilization, Dwarf Fortress, Spore, Adam Cadre's IF game "Varicella", and the Grand Theft Auto series.

The sandbox scenario is that you're an alien civilization making contact with Earth. You choose a few startup parameters:

What you look like, on the Star Trek scale of alien weirdness: El Aurian->Andorian->Horta->Medusan

The size of your party: individual->small party->large party->army

When you arrive at Earth: ideally any time in human history, but I'd settle for selected times within 50 years of the present.

How much more advanced your technology is than 21st-century Earth's. Maybe higher levels here are something you have to unlock. I suspect higher levels would not make the interesting goals any easier to reach, but they would certainly make the game as a whole more interesting.

An ideology for your party (see below).

One of two scenarios. In the vanilla scenario you start off with one ship in Earth orbit, all your tech works, you can move around the solar system, and you're undetectable unless you break radio silence or otherwise reveal yourself. In the "dammit" scenario your ship has crashed somewhere on Earth and been damaged or destroyed. In this scenario you start with little technology, possibly not even your universal translator.

And that's it. You're weird, you've got advanced technology, and you encounter or are forced into human history. You can try to help humanity (for whatever definition of "help"), make and sell stuff, conquer the planet, try to blend in, try to be accepted, or just repair your ship and get out. The levers of society are exposed to you at all levels: personal relationships, trade, diplomacy, media and propaganda, espionage, etc. You can play it like an RTS, a wargame, a game of stealth and guile, or a tourism ungame. If you play it as a wargame you've got a political wargame, because the tactics you deploy are in the service of some larger goal.

All the time you're controlling some specific member of your party. You can probably switch between party members[0], but there's never, say, a disembodied RTS interface: it's you giving orders to other people. If Bob gives an order, it affects Bob's reputation with the people who see him do it, the people who carry out the order, and the people affected by the order. If humans see any part of this, the part they see affects your whole species' reputation.

Ah, reputation. Humans' ideologies are well-known, but alien ideologies can be different. The player's actions will be interpreted by NPC aliens (if any) through the lens of the party's ideology[1], which might make them happy or unhappy. One thing that might make them happy is converting humans to their ideology. Ideologies would be selected from a list, or assembled piecemeal a la Credo. For some ideologies it might make NPC aliens happy to convert NPC humans to some other ideology; a master morality/slave morality thing. The game's sense of morality is intersubjective rather than objective. There's no "you can't do that" enforcement mechanism; rather, a gradually increasing NPC resentment at having to follow orders they see as unethical.

I'd hate to make this game because it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars (GTA4 cost $100 million) and it would be insanely complex, possibly requiring something close to strong AI. While writing this description I thought about recasting it as a role-playing game, but I can't see it being fun to DM. If you gave the humans a more active role you might be able to have a human team and an alien team.

A variant that might be easier to implement is to switch it around and have humans make contact with aliens. It's easier because you don't have to simulate the alien societies in as much detail. People accept ahistorical and culturally homogeneous alien species without thinking much about it. But it wouldn't be as fun to play, since one of the cool things about my idea is the way it lets you try to manipulate humans on any level.

[0] I don't need to be able to switch to any given member of my army, but in a very large party I'd like to be able to switch to certain archetypes: the leader, the leader's lackey, the guy who runs the media/military/trade operation, the grunt carrying out the media/military/trade plan. People who interact with the humans on any level; no middle managers who are only concerned with other aliens.

[1] The party might not have one fixed ideology; maybe a cruise ship crashes on Earth and the passengers and crew don't get along but they've got to work together, like how I imagine "Lost". Party ideology is just a baseline for personal ideologies. Similarly for humans. You can always find one scummy human who'll deal with you no matter what you do, but if you need a bunch of humans, you'll need to cater to human ideologies or use force.